Ant-ManSave

1989. Pentagon parking garage, after-hours. A younger Hank Pym — Michael Douglas digitally de-aged twenty-five years, in a brown corduroy blazer — storms out of a SHIELD meeting room and confronts Howard Stark and a young Peggy Carter (also de-aged) in the hallway. The SHIELD R&D division, under direction of Mitchell Carson, has been trying for two years to reverse-engineer Pym's Particle — the subatomic-shrinking compound Pym developed in the 1960s that powered his Ant-Man identity through the Cold War. Pym refuses to share the formula. "As long as I'm alive, no one will ever get the Pym Particle. Howard. So help me god, if you ever come asking again, I will tell my wife to bring back the cosmic dust to your son's bed for free." He decks Mitchell Carson in the face and walks out, resigning from SHIELD on the spot. He keeps the Particle in his private lab for the next thirty years.

Present day, San Francisco. Scott Lang — Paul Rudd, charming, perpetually broke, in his late forties — is being released from San Quentin State Prison after serving three years for grand larceny. He's a former systems engineer who, while working a corporate IT job for a security company called Vistacorp, discovered the company had been overcharging its customers by millions in fraudulent fees, decided to be Robin Hood, and stole the entire fraud bonus back to redistribute to the victims. He went to prison; the CEO didn't. Scott walks out of the prison gates and meets his old cellmate Luis (Michael Peña, fast-talking, lovable, the film's secret weapon) who picks him up in a beat-up van. They drive home to Luis's small Mission District apartment that Scott crashes in.

Scott's daughter Cassie — eight years old, freckles, the only thing he cares about in the world — lives with his ex-wife Maggie and her new fiancé Paxton, a police detective. Paxton's not letting Scott near Cassie until Scott has a steady job, a steady apartment, and steady child support. Scott takes a Baskin-Robbins shift to start. On his second day on the job, his manager recognizes his face from the news, fires him. "You stole from this corporation. Baskin-Robbins always finds out." Scott walks out, considers his daughter, considers his options. Luis pitches him a heist. There's a guy — "old guy named Hank Pym" — who lives in a mansion in Pacific Heights with a massive in-floor safe. "My cousin's friend's dad's locksmith says it's the heaviest safe he ever saw." Scott agrees.

The heist: Scott, Luis, Kurt (a Russian computer hacker), and Dave (Luis's wheelman) infiltrate Hank Pym's mansion at 2 AM. They drain the swimming pool, climb in through the drain, crack the safe — which turns out to contain only a single strange object inside: a red-and-silver leather motorcycle suit with a metal helmet shaped like an ant's head, plus a small black-glass capsule called the Pym Disc. Scott steals it. He brings it home. Inside his shabby apartment bathtub later that night, Scott pulls the suit on and presses the red button on the wrist gauntlet. He shrinks instantly to a quarter-inch tall. The bathtub becomes a tidal wave. He falls through floorboards, through plumbing pipes, through the wall and into the apartment below, then through that floor, through several more floors, lands in a dance club inside a sneaker, gets stepped on, gets carried out in a Hoover vacuum, ends up in a city storm-sewer at sunrise standing in front of a giant rat the size of a Mack truck. He hits the button again. He returns to full size on the sidewalk in front of a brunch crowd. Hank Pym, in a coffee shop across the street, watches the whole thing.

Hank Pym recruits Scott. Hank lives alone in the Pacific Heights mansion with his daughter Hope van Dyne — Evangeline Lilly, sharp-suited, sharp-tongued — who is the COO of Pym Technologies, the company Hank founded and that has now been taken over by Hank's protégé Darren Cross. Cross — Corey Stoll, shaved head, cold eyes, deeply ambitious — has been independently developing a recreated version of the Pym Particle that he calls Yellowjacket. The Yellowjacket suit has shrinking capability identical to Ant-Man's, but also includes built-in offensive weaponry — wrist blasters, mounted blades, a yellow-and-black exoskeleton. Cross plans to sell the Yellowjacket prototype to HYDRA buyers within the week. Hope and Hank need Scott — an experienced thief who can break into Pym Tech, steal the Yellowjacket suit, destroy Cross's research data, and prevent the Particle from going to HYDRA. Why Scott and not Hope, who has been training her whole life and is a better fighter? Because Hope's mother Janet van Dyne — Hank's wife, the original Wasp — disappeared into the Quantum Realm in 1987 on a mission to disarm a Soviet nuclear missile, and Hank refuses to put another family member at risk. Hope is furious.

Training. Scott spends the next month in Hank's converted basement laboratory learning to operate the Ant-Man suit. He learns to summon and command ants via a Bluetooth-paired earpiece that converts neural signals to ant-pheromone language. He gets a horse ant named Anthony, his ride. He learns Crazy Ant trick formations. He gets thrown off a roof a dozen times. Hope teaches him hand-to-hand combat. They start to develop a flirty rapport that Hank ostentatiously doesn't notice. Meanwhile Darren Cross at Pym Tech is conducting his own tests — he's been shrinking lab animals but they keep collapsing into red-mist puddles upon scale-restoration because his recreated Particle isn't stable. He needs Hank's original formula. He's getting more desperate by the day.

Scott infiltrates the Avengers Compound. Hank's plan requires a specific compact technology that's stored at the new Avengers facility upstate New York. Scott, in the Ant-Man suit, breaks into the compound — but Sam Wilson, the Falcon, is on patrol and detects him via a thermal scan. The two of them fight in the air around the compound — Scott shrinks down to a quarter-inch riding atop Falcon's wings while Falcon spins corkscrews trying to throw him off. Scott pulls a logic bomb on Sam, escapes with the device, and Sam mutters his classic line to Steve Rogers's voicemail. "I think the Spider-Man — uh, I mean, the new guy — is gonna be a problem. We need to find him before someone else does." Marvel was already laying tracks for Civil War (2016).

The Pym Tech heist. Scott, Luis, Kurt, and Dave drive a fake delivery truck to Pym Technologies HQ in the middle of the night. Scott shrinks down and rides the truck's intake duct in as the package. Inside the building, he ant-summons, hacks Cross's security with Kurt's help, and sneaks into the central vault where the Yellowjacket suit is held. He plants thermite charges to incinerate Cross's research records. Then Cross arrives early at the facility — he's been suspicious for weeks — and traps Scott and Hope inside with armed security. Hank, watching from the van outside, has a heart attack from stress. Cross attempts to shoot Hank through the office window with a sniper rifle from the rooftop. The whole heist collapses. Cross gets the Yellowjacket suit on. He activates it. He pulls the Particle disc out of his vault and prepares to go to a HYDRA buyer's auction at midnight.

Cassie's birthday party. Maggie has been hosting Cassie's birthday party at her house in the Sunset District. Scott had promised Cassie he'd be there. Scott, in the Ant-Man suit, races there from Pym Tech and arrives just as Cross — in the Yellowjacket suit — flies in through the back wall of Cassie's bedroom with his Pym Particle disc to kill Scott's daughter and Scott in revenge for the failed heist. The fight in Cassie's bedroom is the film's iconic centerpiece: Scott and Cross both shrunk to quarter-inch tall, fighting across Cassie's playroom rug, climbing the bedposts, swinging from a hanging mobile, with Cassie's Thomas the Tank Engine playset becoming the size of an actual freight rail line. Scott rides Anthony through the train cars while Cross fires laser blasts. At one point Cross knocks a kid's toy onto a record player and the sound shifts to ambient noise of a giant Thomas the Tank Engine train arriving at a station. The fight is genuine slapstick on the scale of a kid's bedroom but with the geometry of an action film.

Scott realizes his only chance to defeat Cross is to shrink subatomically — the same mode Janet van Dyne entered to disarm the 1987 missile, the mode from which no one returns. He hits the Yellowjacket suit's Particle disc with a depleted-uranium bullet, breaking its safety regulator. Then Scott voluntarily disables his own regulator. He shrinks past the molecular threshold. He breaks Cross's suit from the inside. He shrinks down past the atomic scale into the Quantum Realm — an Escher-esque, kaleidoscopic, time-dilated subatomic dimension first hinted at in Doctor Strange (2016) a year later. Cross dies in a smoking puddle on Cassie's bedroom carpet.

Scott is lost in the Quantum Realm. He can see his hands. He sees impossible geometry. Hank, on the outside in his lab, has accepted Scott is dead. Hank says goodbye. Then Scott — through pure will and his daughter's voice calling him in his head — finds his way back. He hits the suit's regulator, reverses the shrinking, and pops back into Cassie's bedroom standing in front of a wrecked Thomas the Tank Engine track. The bedroom is a mess. Cassie is fine. Maggie sees Scott in the Ant-Man suit and gets a very different impression of what "steady job" might mean. Paxton, in the doorway of Cassie's bedroom, sees Scott save his daughter and decides the man is allowed to be a part of his daughter's life after all.

Mid-credits. Hank and Hope, in Hank's basement laboratory, open a hidden vault that contains the original Wasp suit — the one Hank built for Janet in the 1980s before she disappeared. He hands it to Hope. "It's time. She's gone. I see her in you. She wanted you to be part of this." Hope, choked up, picks up the suit. "It's about damn time." The film teases Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) with that single line.

Post-credits. The post-credits scene is a direct lift from Captain America: Civil War (2016)'s opening — Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers in a garage somewhere, with Bucky Barnes chained to a forklift behind them, Bucky's metal arm in restraints. Cap and Sam are debating who to call for help. Sam: "I know a guy." Cut to Scott Lang's face. End credits. Marvel just confirmed Scott Lang will be in Civil War — eight months before that film came out — in a single closing shot.